A typical approach to testing computer programs or applications is to input test data to the application, capture the response of the application to this input, and determine if the response is correct given the known input. For applications which receive very large or complex inputs, producing the input needed to test the application may be difficult and costly.
Applications may be designed to be chained together, with the output of one application directed to the input of another application. In a test environment, the upstream application may be configured to direct its output into a test data file, and this test data file may be employed to provide input to the downstream application under test. In some circumstances existing data files may be edited to produce the needed test data file. In other cases a data file may be manually created from scratch and thereafter edited to produce different test data files.